This does not mean that attendance and graduation rates are not important. They remain important because they show that students are engaged and that the school is stable. They should not be used to measure whether a school is successful. In Minnesota, students are not required to be proficient on state exams to graduate. That is the gap.
Help me out here because I have more questions (rhetorical) than the average person.
What is the big Twin Cities mainstream media drive and district superintendent LinkedIn posts about rising graduation rates in their districts? Minnesota school districts and local media often highlight rising graduation rates as proof of success, but that narrative can be misleading when examined alongside actual academic outcomes. Data from the Minnesota Department of Education consistently shows significant gaps in reading, math, and science proficiency among high school seniors (MN School Report Card, 2025). A diploma signals completion, not mastery. Students can accumulate credits, benefit from grade inflation, or receive accommodations that move them forward without demonstrating grade-level competence.
From a communication and marketing lens, the direction toward emphasizing graduation rates is strategic; it is a clean, marketable metric that reassures the public and protects institutional credibility. It is easier to report that “more students are graduating” than to confront the fact that many are not prepared for college, careers, or independent living. This creates a false sense of progress while masking deeper systemic issues. In reality, if proficiency and life readiness lag behind graduation rates, the system is producing credentials without capability, and that disconnect carries long-term consequences.
Many schools think that if students show up and graduate, they are doing their job. They do not really think about what students can actually do after they graduate.
What are we really celebrating here?
Going to school is necessary, but it does not guarantee learning. A student can attend school for 12 years and still not be able to read, write, or do math when they graduate. The real measure is what they have learned, not just their presence in the classroom. (Read: Education vs. Learning: The Key and Important Distinctions – Industry Minds).
A diploma should signify that a student has acquired essential knowledge and skills. When graduation becomes more about meeting a goal than about genuine learning, the diploma loses its meaning and no longer accurately represents student achievement.
When people talk about how education is getting better, they use words like “growth” and “progress.” They say things like “student engagement” and “pathways to success.” These words sound good. Sometimes they are just used to avoid talking about whether students are really learning. There is a clear difference between simply improving test scores and truly achieving meaningful learning. Recognizing this distinction encourages us to focus on what students can do, not just how they perform on assessments.
A school can say its students are getting better if they start with low scores and improve a little. That is not the same as really achieving something. It is not enough to say that students are getting better if they start with very low scores. Minnesota’s graduation rates are often presented as evidence that the system is working. On paper, they look strong. But that narrative deserves serious scrutiny. Graduation rates measure completion, not mastery. A student can graduate without reading, writing, or doing math at grade level. That is not speculation; that is supported by statewide assessment data showing large percentages of students below proficiency (Daniel Koretz, 2017)
So, when graduation rates rise while proficiency stagnates, something does not add up. The system is signaling success without proving learning.
Again, graduation rates are clean, easy numbers that communicate progress to the public. They are politically useful. But they can also distract from deeper problems. When policymakers and districts highlight graduation rates without equally emphasizing academic readiness, they shift attention away from whether students are truly prepared. Education-system fixer and author Michael Fullan calls this distraction from deeper problems, the wrong drivers. Fullan writes, “The wrong drivers are those that are ineffective in achieving the desired result, while seeming to be successful” (Fullan, 2011). There is also a technical issue that gets overlooked. Schools can point to “growth” as success, students moving from very low scores to slightly higher, but still below grade level. That kind of growth is real, but it is not the same as achievement. A student moving from the 10th percentile to the 25th percentile is still behind. Derek Briggs (University of Colorado) says, “Growth measures can be misleading if they are taken as evidence of proficiency or readiness” (Briggs, 2013).
Calling that success without context lowers the bar. This creates a dangerous dynamic. Systems begin to optimize for what is measured, graduation and minimal growth, rather than what actually matters: literacy, critical thinking, and readiness for college, career, and life. Over time, expectations quietly decline.
The result is a gap between perception and reality.
Families hear that schools are improving. But when students graduate and struggle in college, the workforce, or basic literacy tasks, the truth becomes harder to ignore.
The students who graduate without essential skills face difficulties in the real world. They need to be able to analyze data, communicate effectively, and solve problems independently. Without these skills, they will struggle to succeed beyond school.
This does not mean that attendance and graduation rates are not important. They remain important because they show that students are engaged and that the school is stable. They should not be used to measure whether a school is successful.
The real measure of a school is not how many students are there every day or how many diplomas they give out. The real measure is how many students leave school able to read, write, think mathematically, and be members of society.
Education should be about looking at what matters, not just what looks good. We should use data to tell the truth, not to hide it. We should tell the public what our students are really learning, not just how often they go to school and how many graduate.
If we want people to trust our schools again, we need to focus on what we are really teaching, not just how many students we have.
Going to school is the beginning.
Graduation is a milestone.
The real goal is what students actually learn.
Related: Minnesota’s Graduation Miracle Deserves a Closer Look
Don, Thank you so much for contributing this piece, and for hanging in there through the “Ed-school” experience! When I got to the bottom of the article, I was heartened to read your list of degrees, which sounds a lot like the list I would expect associated with one or more Commenters weighing in to disagree with you! Good luck with that Dissertation!
I am old enough – 70 – to remember when schools did not brag about Graduation Rate. It was simply not thought of as a measure of a school’s success or failure. Rather, like the various “flavors” of “% Going on to College” (another that gets bragged about today…), it was seen as indicative of something about the community as a whole, not the school building or district. High Graduation Rate implied the community had a regard for education – and perhaps a functioning system for enforcing attendance. (When I was in school, in Illinois, there were still “Truant Officers”…!). The “% Going on to College” was universally viewed as an indicator of the community’s class status, on average. Higher numbers indicated a professional or white-collar middle – to – upper-middle-class community, while lower indicated a blue-collar or trades or service-economy middle – to- lower-middle-class community. No one pretended either measure implied much at all about the quality of the school or school district itself. I want to a H.S. in a suburban district with four schools, next door to another district with eight, all twelve built to be roughly the same size, serving up almost identical curricula, with faculty that job-hopped freely among them. All twelve had Graduation Rates in the high 90’s. Some of the schools had %-to-College rates that exceeded 70%. Mine had a rate of 30% the year I graduated. We were, in fact, the blue-collar/tradesman/service-worker neighborhood in the broader area. Because of activities I was involved in, I had friends in all those schools, and visited most of the schools frequently for one thing or another. No one pretended that they were significantly different from one another AS SCHOOLS because of the differences in %-to-college.
You state “Families hear that schools are improving”, and yes, that is true. And it’s always been true. What teacher or administrator is going to say otherwise in public? But anyone who attended public schools in the ’60s-’70s, then shepherded one or more children through public schools in the ’80s-’90s, and then looked on as those kids engaged with the schools on behalf of THEIR kids in the ’10s-’20s, as I have, will tell you it’s not true. There has been, all things considered, gradual but ongoing decline. Schools today, generally, are better at some things, but are not as good at keeping the lion’s share of students at, above, or at least near, accepted grade levels in math and reading, and they are unbelievably inferior in the social studies / civics / etc. (A curious contrast is that I think most schools today do a palpably better job imparting writing skills to their relatively successful students – especially if one factors in how much less-well they are imparting reading skills.)
I probably don’t have to tell you that you are embarking on a career in which simply questioning “rosy scenarios” in public education performance will make you unpopular with your peers. Please hang in there! We need more like you “on the inside” of the system.
– Dr. James A. Klein, B.S. Chem. Engrg. (Mich. St. U. ’77), Ph.D. ChemE, (U. of Calif., Berkeley ’84)